AN: I apologize for the relative lateness of this! I had a metric fuckton of homework plus I attended a fairly late showing of the Hunger Games the other night, so it kind of threw my schedule off. Anyhow, it's kind of a quiet chapter this time around, but hey, sometimes you need to slow the pace down a bit, yeah? So many thanks for the continued positive feedback, I couldn't keep going if it wasn't for you guys. Oh yeah, and I own nothing. If you thought I did, I suggest you go brush up on copyright laws.

Puck hadn't opened his eyes just yet, but it felt like noon. He could feel the sun's rays dancing through the bedroom window and across his face, and the laziness in his bones that came from sleeping in late after a mildly traumatic night.

Traumatic night. Well, spending an hour in a bus with Rachel Berry and having to sit at the dinner table with her was pretty traumatic. A bunch of superspy wizards hiding under the White House was pretty traumatic. Watching Harry's living room getting blown to bits was pretty traumatic.

Harry. He came to the realization that something warm and heavy and suspiciously like a body was pressed against his side, and he cracked one eye open and realized that his suspicions were indeed correct. Harry was out cold and tucked against Puck's side. Puck realized then that he had an arm thrown over Harry. He was struck then by how awkward, objectively speaking, the situation should have been, and briefly contemplated removing his arm and rolling over to the opposite end of the bed. He discovered to his own surprise that he really didn't want to. As awkward as it should have been, it was comfortable and natural just lying there and damn if he wasn't staring at Harry just a little bit, watching the rise and fall of his chest and the relaxed contours of his face. He'd never actually woken up next to someone before, never took the time to just enjoy the morning quiet. The moment was perfect.

It might have been a minute or an hour later, Puck didn't know, but presently Harry opened his own eyes. His green eyes were glassy and confused for a moment in the morning light, but when he finally focused his eyes went enormous and he tensed up.

"Damn. Should this be awkward?"

Puck couldn't help but laugh. "Only if you want it to be?"

"Then I don't want it to be," said Harry decisively. He leaned back again, and uncoiled like a cat lying down to rest. They stayed like that for a while in companionable silence, until Harry finally broke it. "I owe you the whole story now, don't I?"

"You did promise," said Puck. He rolled over so that he was leaning on his side, chin resting in the palm of his hand and elbow propped up, the better to observe Harry. Harry didn't look panicked or queasy or any of the things that he might have been, only thoughtful.

"You know, it's so strange," he said. "I never had to sit down and tell my life story to people before. They just kind of…knew everything already."

Puck dimly remembered something about publicity the night before. "Well, here's your chance to make everything sound a whole lot cooler than it was," he said, grinning.

Harry flashed a smile, almost in spite of himself. "No, the press does a good job of that on their own. I'm here to tell the truth."

"Take your time," said Puck, and he meant it. The truth wasn't always easy. Digging up your own skeletons wasn't always easy.

Harry crossed his arms over his chest and seemed to look inward for a bit, until he said bluntly: "My parents were murdered on Halloween night. I was a year old."

Puck felt something twist hard and painfully in his chest. Harry had mentioned dead parents, but never mentioned that they were murdered. It filled his mind with all sorts of horrible thoughts. What if he or Quinn died? What if Rachel's mother died? That would leave Beth an orphan, same as Harry, same as any tortured hero of a coming of age tale.

Harry continued, though, oblivious. "They shipped me off to my aunt and uncle. I didn't know anything. I didn't know about magic, didn't know that my parents had been murdered. They told me it was a car crash." He paused for a moment, struggling with wording. "They treated me like shit."

Puck lifted an eyebrow, wanting to know more but feeling that it would be exceedingly rude even by his standards to ask to hear more. Harry was smart enough to pick up on that, though.

"It wasn't as bad as it might have been, but it wasn't great. I didn't always get to eat. I slept in the cupboard. But I came out alive, and that's what counted."

That ugly twisting feeling was back again.

"I turned eleven and a representative from a magical boarding school broke down my door, told me I had powers, and informed me that I was famous in the Wizarding world. Because my parents had died, and I hadn't. They were murdered by the leader of the Death Eaters."

Puck thought of the gang that had shown up the previous night, and felt all the little puzzle pieces slowly shifting into place.

"His name was Voldemort. People never survived him. They weren't supposed to. But he tried to kill me, and he couldn't, and his power broke. And it made me a hero. A hero because he killed everyone else and he couldn't kill me." His voice was thick now, and Puck knew it was thick with self hate. Knew it because he couldn't count the number of times he'd come home from school, bowed his head, and said things in that same tone of voice.

Harry barreled on though, with the distinct air of someone unleashing a floodgate of pent up secrets. "So I went to magical school, made friends, life should have been good. But Voldemort wasn't dead and if I got a galleon for every time I almost died while I was at school, I'd be a fucking rich bastard. Surviving turned me into a target. Fourth year, he finally managed to infiltrate an interschool competition, killed a schoolmate, took my blood, and made himself a body."

Puck recoiled. "He made…a body? From your blood?"

Harry laughed, but it was entirely humorless. "Up until that point, he'd been even less than human. Not a ghost, you see, because he wasn't dead. But bodiless, until he took my blood."

It occurred to Puck that magic was kind of an ugly thing.

"Once he had a body, he started putting an army together. I tried warning people. No one believed me. Shit blew up eventually, my godfather was killed and it was my fucking fault, and I was finally informed of a prophecy."

"Like…a prediction of the future? Magic does that too?"

"Sort of. It turned out, I was destined to either kill Voldemort or get killed. 'Neither can live while the other survives'," he intoned dully, like it was a line he'd picked over in his brain many times.

"Wow…shit. Talk about a hanging axe." Puck honestly didn't have it in him to be much more eloquent than that. It all was starting to make a horrifying sort of sense now, all of Harry's little behavioral habits and personality traits coming together to form a person whom fate and fortune had shitted on.

Harry snorted. "No kidding. And then the man who had been my mentor died, but not before we both figured out that Voldemort had gone beyond…the usual evil."

"A mass murder reassembling his body from blood isn't the usual evil?"

"Not when there's magic involved. He split his soul into seven pieces through the act of murder, and stored six of those pieces in different objects. As long as those objects existed, he could never die. Which meant that if I wanted to kill him I had to get rid of all those things first, whereas if he wanted to kill me all he had to do was track me down and say the word. Anyhow, he finally took over the government and there was a war and I was on the run with two friends the whole time, tracking down those bits of his soul."

"That shit about gang wars was a lie the whole time, right? It was actually a Wizarding coup?"

"Right in one. Finally, we managed to get rid of the bits of his soul but there was a final battle at my school. So many people died. Kids died. And that was the night I found out that I had to die. Because the night he killed me, he attached a bit of his soul to mine. So I did it, I offered myself up to die."

Bile was rising in Puck's throat, because he could picture it so clearly. Dead kids and dead parents and Harry marching off to his own death.

"He couldn't kill me, though, because of that. When he fired the killing curse, it killed that bit of his soul and not me, and I survived to finally take him down. It just took so long. And so many people died, and a lot of it was because I didn't know any better and didn't turn myself up to die earlier." That bitter edge was creeping back into Harry's voice.

Puck put out a hand hesitantly. He really wasn't experienced with this kind of thing. He knew how to beat people up or fuck them senseless, not offer comfort and sympathy. He rested a hand on Harry's knee anyway, though. "You can't hold yourself responsible for what a horrible murdering bastard chose to do. You had to balls to offer yourself up to die for the world. Not everybody would be able to make that choice."

Harry tilted his head, disbelief lurking in his expression.

"I'm serious," said Puck, and he was. "Do you honestly think that anyone in this shithole would be willing to sacrifice that much to save people other than themselves? Probably not. Life dumped a truckload of shit on you, and yet you managed to turn out to be one of the best people I've ever met. You have a lot to be proud of."

Harry was frowning now, but it wasn't an angry frown. It was simply confused. "I killed people. I was the reason others died. This doesn't bother you?"

"It would bother me if you were some kind of serial killer creep, but you're not, so it doesn't. You killed in self defense, and other people died because it was a war."

Harry's expression was still clouded. "You make it sound so simple."

"Because sometimes, shit really is that simple. You're a good person who went through bad stuff. Doesn't mean you need to beat yourself up over it for the rest of your life. Trust me, I'm talking from experience. If I had existential guilt for every time in the past that I hurt someone, I'd be sitting in this room for the rest of my life and where the hell would that get anyone? Nowhere."

Harry cracked a smile at long last, and Puck felt his lungs give an uncomfortable squeeze. "I keep forgetting this town put you through a mill yourself. I suppose you would know what the hell you're talking about."

"Yeah, I would, come to think of it." He had never thought of it that way before. "We turned out pretty functional considering what we started out with, yeah?"

Harry finally tossed back his head and laughed, and Puck didn't think he'd ever heard such a freeing sound in the world. "Yes, we're damn fantastic." And for once, it was said without a trace of sarcasm.

It was probably nine o'clock at night, and Harry and Puck were still holed up in Puck's bedroom, trying to bullshit answers on homework that had been neglected in favor of Regionals and a rogue gang of Death Eaters. Their conversations were different now, though, now that Harry wasn't reeling in every time he seemed in danger of slipping and dropping an anecdote about his old life.

Harry dropped his head on his Physics textbook. "Merlin, it feels so damn good to not have to lie all the time, you have no idea."

"I don't think you ever actually lied to me," Puck pointed out.

Harry raised his head an inch off the book. "Since when?"

"Since always. You never actually lied. You just straight up told me when you weren't allowed to say something."

"Huh. I never realized that."

Puck punched him on the shoulder. "Well, now you do. Now quit trying to feel like an awful person all the time."

Monday came, and they shuffled into school. It was strange, the way that the crowds kept going like nothing had ever happened but Puck was now savvy to the fact that an entire underground of magic lurked under the surface of society. Knowing all of the stuff he knew made him feel great, like there was more to life than what he'd known before, but it also made him depressed. There was so much to see out in the world and there he was, crammed in McKinley High and sharing the locker room with mouth breathing bastards like Azimio and Karofsky.

People were whispering, though, when Harry and Puck walked in together, and Puck couldn't figure out why. It wasn't like it should have been a foreign sight. Puck had been drifting farther and farther away from the football crowd and actually spent free time hanging out with Glee people these days.

But then he realized that the Glee people themselves were staring too. Finn turned from his locker and gave Puck and Harry that kind of pop-eyed, blank expression that he usually wore in a math class. Quinn did a slow blink. Tina caught sight of them out of the corner of her compact mirror and stabbed herself in the eye with her mascara.

"The fuck is up with everyone today?" asked Puck.

Harry shrugged. "Beats me."

But then from around the corner came a wolf-whistle. "Fuckin' finally," announced a triumphant Santana Lopez.

Puck exchanged a glance with Harry, who looked just as baffled as he did. And then it hit him.

The letterman jacket.

Harry was wearing Puck's letterman jacket. They'd had another impromptu sleepover the night before, so of course Harry didn't have a change of clothes. Puck had given him a t-shirt and the letterman to borrow, completely forgetting what that would mean to the rest of the school at large.

Well, shit. "Can it, Satan. We're not fucking. He just needed a jacket."

Harry's eyebrows shot up. "Oh, is that what it is? If I wear your clothes it means we're fucking?"

"Pretty much, yeah," said Puck. The red letterman, after all, was sacred material at McKinley high, the utmost of status symbols, and the average footballer entrusted it to only two people: himself and his latest girlfriend.

Harry plucked at the collar a bit. "Sorry to let you down, Santana. No new gossip here. He really was just letting me wear the jacket."

Santana looked distinctly crestfallen. "Good luck convincing everyone else the rest of today, though," she said. "I can sniff sex from a mile away, so I can tell that you blue-balled bastards are being honest and you losers aren't hitting anything anyway. The rest of the school? Not so much."

Harry look thoughtful for a moment, and then shrugged out of the jacket, handing it back to Puck. "Whatever. It's not even that cold. I'd hate to spread false rumors, yeah?" He threw a wink at Santana who only gave him a filthy glare, and then he wandered off to first period.

When he had turned the corner, Santana shook her head disapprovingly at Puck. "I'm disappointed, Puckerman. Aren't you supposed to be my male counterpart in crime? And you can't even get that British bonbon to put out."

She too left, leaving Puck leaning up against the locker and still holding his jacket. He was mildly disappointed. It had been oddly gratifying, the sight of Harry walking around in his jacket. And if people thought they were fucking, so what? It wasn't so far from what he actually wanted.

Kurt Hummel was back at McKinley High. Puck felt his respect for Santana go up another notch. Their relationship back in the day hadn't been good for much other than hate sex and he'd be lying if he claimed to actually want to spend time around her, but he had a healthy respect for her scheming prowess. She'd somehow blackmailed Karofsky into joining the Bullywhips, ridiculous red satin beret and all, and lured Kurt back into McKinley so they'd have an even better shot at Nationals, and she'd done it all in teetering five inch heels and a Cheshire cat grin.

Kurt was ecstatic to be back at McKinley, probably far more than he should have been. The New Directions were thrilled to have him back and fired up for New York and Nationals. Most of the school at large didn't care, except to have him back as a spectacle in the hallways to point and whisper at whenever he wore something particularly wild. But the rest of the jocks? They weren't pleased.

Puck and Harry were minding their own business in the courtyard, copying Artie's Physics homework when they overheard a conversation.

"Hummel is back? Seriously? Didn't the pussy run screaming like four months ago?"

"Yeah, I thought so too. But the bitch just came back from more."

"Jesus Christ. And life was so great around here without that fagginess."

Puck could almost see Harry's hackles raise. He started to rise from his own seat, Physics homework be damned.

"Honestly, the fag should just leave again. The school was so nice without all the gay dirtying up the place."

Harry snorted then, audibly, and the two jocks deep in conversation turned to look at him. "Honestly? You two thought that Kurt was the only gay person in the school, and his being here stunk the place up?"

The two jocks gave Harry a look like he was dense, which was rather rich in irony from Puck's perspective. "Yeah? Look at the shit he wears. Gay as hell, and he's the only one who wears it."

Puck spoke up. "You think clothes make people gay? That's fucking stupid."

"You know, he's right," said one of the jocks, and Puck started. He didn't think they were likely to get through to them. "It's not the clothes that make the gay, it's the gay that makes the clothes," he continued, and Puck's heart sank.

"Yeah, it makes sense, doesn't it? If you like cock, you wear clothes that ask for it."

Harry was regarding them with a slightly dumbfounded expression, but Puck knew him well enough to see the rage growing. "There's nothing wrong with what he likes to wear. And furthermore, I'll have you idiots know, being interested in men doesn't mean you dress like you 'ask for it', whatever the hell that's supposed to mean.

"Oh really?"

"Yeah, really. Like me, for starters. Do I look like I'm 'asking for it' to you?" His expression was positively terrifying, and the pair of jocks shrunk back a bit. Harry regarded them for another moment, letting them stew a bit in fear, before turning on his heels and storming off.

Puck's insides were dancing the conga. Harry liked dudes. He had a shot. And damn if he wasn't hot as hell when he was angry.

Sometime in the middle of fourth period, Becky the Cheerio barged in, nose in the air, with a note for Puck. It was an order to go down to Sue Sylvester's office immediately.

Puck considered himself a brave man. He'd outlasted everything from juvenile detention to show choir warfare to magician gangs. But nevertheless, he was shaking in his shoes as he knocked on the door to Sue Sylvester's office. He couldn't remember what he'd done. Had he insulted a Cheerio? Had he breathed within a hundred yard radius of Coach Sylvester? Had she decided to jump to the next level and involve him in her machinations to tear down the Glee Club from within?

She pulled open the door, and peered down her nose at him, before letting out a gust of air and resettling herself at her desk, shuffling through files.

"Touch anything in my office again, Jersey Shore, and I'll personally see to it that you never procreate again."

"I knocked on the door."

"And? Who told you to sully the door to my haven with your unclean, STD infested fingers? Now have a seat on the plastic wrapped chair, and try not to exhale on my desk. I wouldn't want to get your germs on it, and then become inflicted with the sudden urge to grow a squirrel on top of my head."

Puck gingerly sat down on the edge of the chair, one hand moving self-consciously toward his hair. "So? Why am I here?"

Coach Sylvester was now setting about making an iron shake, throwing what looked suspiciously like human knuckle bones into the mix. "You're here because you have somehow managed to thrust your snotty, snubby nose into international magical affairs and recruited the world's shortest, brattiest war hero for your pimply and nasally gang of worthless teenagers attempting to teach trite After School Special messages by way of Journey and grossly misused top 40 tunes."

Puck, for once in his life, was near speechless. "You know about magic?"

"During my stint with the CIA in the seventies, I may or may not have been assigned to infiltrate the Soviet Ministry of Magic and had a brief affair with the Minister himself before snapping his wand in half, neutering him, and escaping from the window of a sixteenth floor room by way of a flying tin can." She was now adding iron shavings to her shake.

Puck opened his mouth to say something, but she cut him off as she snapped the lid shut on her shake container and shook it ferociously, as if it had done her great personal harm. "Now, man-slut-in-training, I don't think I need to impress on you the seriousness of the situation?"

Puck gulped and shook his head.

"Breathe a word of magic to anyone but midget Scarface and you will find yourself a world of hurt. The Auror department may not have had the sense to get one of their own useless bints to tail you, but remember, Sue Sylvester has eyes. Everywhere. One hundred and sixty-three eyes to be precise, not counting the beautiful orbs of truth and justice currently set in my face that you have been blessed with the opportunity to admire. Am I clear?"

"Yes, Coach," he gulped.

"Good. You are excused. Try not to set off the landmine to the left of the door on your way out. It took my Cheerios six hours and nineteen toothbrushes to get the blood off the ceiling the last time someone set it off."

Puck ran out the door faster than he'd ever run in his life.

Sue Sylvester is a precious gem and I can't believe I didn't use her in this story earlier. But never fear, she'll appear again soon.